As thousands of Ulster Protestants commemorate the 313th anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne this weekend, one group of loyalists will be sitting isolated and in exile among the grim streets of Bolton.

They once either belonged to or followed the most feared loyalist terrorist unit in Northern Ireland, responsible for more than 40 killings in the Nineties.

The families, friends and comrades of Johnny 'Mad Dog' Adair were part of the loyalist paramilitary elite, feared and respected in equal measure by those around them on Belfast's Lower Shankill estate. Today they are in purdah, unable to celebrate Ulster Protestantism's most sacred day - the Twelfth.

Last week, detectives in Lancashire arrested six former members of Adair's C company of the Ulster Defence Association. They were taken in for questioning about the murder earlier this year of another notorious loyalist, John 'Grugg' Gregg, the would-be assassin of Gerry Adams and later Adair's nemesis.

Neighbours, councillors, pub owners and police in Bolton must be wondering why the feuds that have torn apart the largest loyalist paramilitary group in Ulster would be visited on this part of north-west England.

The answer lies in the links forged between Adair, dissident loyalists in mid-Ulster and English neo-Nazis based round Bolton.

While he was in jail serving 15 years for directing terrorism, Adair came to admire the other charismatic figure of hard-line loyalist terrorism, Billy 'King Rat' Wright. Wright had been leader of the rival Ulster Volunteer Force in Portadown up until 1996.

In a dispute over the UVF's ceasefire, Wright was expelled from the UVF under sentence of death. Instead of leaving Northern Ireland, Wright set up a new paramilitary group, the Loyalist Volunteer Force, opposed to the peace process.

For decades, the British far Right has sought to promote the loyalist cause, often to the embarrassment of some loyalist leaders in Belfast. Disgusted with the UVF and UDA ceasefires and perceiving them as going soft on the IRA, neo-Nazis in groups such as Combat 18 drifted to Wright's LVF.

A number of Wright's followers had neo-fascist and racist sympathies and during the Drumcree disputes from 1997 to 1999 invited delegations from Combat 18 in the Bolton and Oldham area to Portadown. The Lancashire fascists were billeted in homes on loyalist estates in the build-up to the annual Drumcree parade, which was banned from passing along the nationalist Garvaghy Road.

When Wright was assassinated inside the Maze by republicans at Christmas in 1997, he became a martyrnot only for loyalists, but also their CI8 sympathisers. One of those who travelled before and after Wright's murder was a tattooist from Bolton.

The demand for tattoos of Wright's image became so popular that the body artist set up business in Ulster during the summer. He made an annual pilgrimage to Portadown, financing his trip by tattooing Wright's face on to hundreds of loyalist bodies, male and female.

The Bolton fascists may have lost one icon but after 1999 they gained another: Johnny Adair. Against the advice of his mentor, the convicted killer John White, Adair courted the English fascists and even wore an England shirt during Euro 2000, given to him by the Bolton CI8 delegation.

Links were established between C18 and other fascists from Bolton and C company in the Lower Shankill. On the day the first loyalist feud erupted in August 2000, a small delegation of Bolton C18 was in the Lower Shankill when Adair's C company fired the first shots at a UVF bar, sparking off a feud that claimed 12 lives.

It was natural, therefore, for the remnants of C company, or at least those still loyal to Adair, to flee to the Lancashire town when they were routed earlier this year in an internal UDA feud. Adair's bid to seize total control of the UDA ended with him being re-incarcerated and his family and closest friends expelled at gunpoint from the province.

Those who fled included his wife, Gina, his oldest son, John Junior, one of his two daughters, Cloe, and his baby son, Jay. Among his trusted lieutenants who looked to Bolton as their bolthole were brothers Herbie and Sham Miller, Ian Truesdale, Wayne Dowie, Jackie Thompson and the McQuade brothers.

Among those branded in Belfast as one of the 'Bolton Wanderers' was 21-year-old Alan McCullough, the last CO of C company. McCullough brought the feud to Bolton in April, when he sought to ingratiate himself with the UDA leadership back in Belfast. He hatched a deal with Adair's enemies to pinpoint the rest of the 'Bolton Wanderers', some of whom were responsible for assassinating Gregg. McCullough showed a UDA hit team where Gina Adair was living in Bolton and her house was later raked with machine gun fire.

McCullough then returned to Belfast, believing that he had been forgiven by the UDA and that he would be accepted back into the fold. Instead he was double-crossed. McCullough agreed to go out to a meeting with two UDA commanders.

They took him for a meal at a hotel near Belfast airport, during which they discussed the whereabouts of the 'Bolton Wanderers' and the location of money they believed the exiles controlled that originally belonged to the C company war chest. After dinner, however, the two UDA figures took McCullough up a back road towards Belfast, stopped the car and, after a struggle, shot him in the head.

The killing of McCullough squashed any hopes some the 'Bolton Wanderers' had harboured about making deals to return home. Those who have been close to the exiles for two decades say the majority of them are deeply homesick and have offered money to be allowed back. They are now isolated because their former friends in the fascist underground in Lancashire have abandoned them. Meanwhile, many of their relatives remain on the Shankill Road, effectively hostages who would suffer if the exiles decided to strike back at the mainstream UDA.

Myths abound about how the 'Bolton Wanderers' have large amounts of money secreted in England, Northern Ireland and even Spain. The reality is that most are broke. Before the flight of the Adairs and their supporters at the start of this year, the UDA, through torture and intimidation, discovered where most of the proceeds of drugs, racketeering and prostitution were hidden.

Unable to return home, living more frugally than they ever have before, isolated even from their former admirers in the far Right, the exiles are likely to stay put in Bolton for the foreseeable future. And given loyalism's innate thirst for revenge, it is likely that there will be further incidents in a Lancashire town that most of its residents thought had nothing to do with the murderous activities of Ulster's paramilitary underworld.